The Debussy is a problematic work. How to chart its elusive progressions from cool elegance, to languor, to playfulness, to anxiety; how to convey nervous unpredictability in its sudden flurries and hesitations whilst keeping a firm grip on its technical demands. Sitkovetsky doesn't quite bring it off; for all the beauty and resource of the playing, for all its technical expertise, something is missing. the illusion of an entirely spontaneous utterance, that extra dimension of fantasy and capriciousness such as one finds, for instance, in the Chung/Lupu reading on Decca. It's the difference, if you like, between a performance that knows precisely where it is going, and one that never quite lets you in on the secret. And there is something else, too a stylistic problem. Sitkovetsky sounds anything but comfortable with Debussy's unique brand of phrasing and colouring. This is a curiously unsensual reading: the languorous glissandos, for instance, here such an in-bred feature of the writing, sound contrived, awkward and anything but seductive. Compare him with Chung in the introduction of the second subject: Chung's highly erotic, husky-voiced halftones are perfectly mirrored in her phrasing—she shapes the rhythm most subtly and persuasively; Sitkovetsky, by contrast, sounds curiously literal—the accenting jars, the tone-colour is plain, unimaginative (most unlike him), conveying little of the music's inherent mystique. Perhaps it's a reading that simply needs to settle more; at this point in time, it never quite transcends the printed page.
Sitkovetsky is, of course, much closer to home in the Janacek Sonata (roughly contemporary with the Debussy) and sounds far happier, far more in sympathy with the music's colour and cast. Here too, one experiences quixotic, temperamentai shifts in mood and emotion—there is even a hint of Gallic scent in the graceful second movement Ballarla—but Sitkovetsky and his partner, Pavel Gililov, sound altogether more intuitive, constantly reminding us that there is no music quite like this. Passions rise, as Janacek writes them, in the blink of an eye. As witness the extraordinary finale: Sitkovetsky is as nervily unsettling with his disruption of the piano's autumnal first subject as he is unequivocally generous with the glorious E major tune which follows, and both players ensure that the tactical shock of Janacek's climax (soulful protestations from the violin against high and wild tremolo patterns in the keyboard—''the Russian armies entering Hungary'') is given full rein.
Excellent work here, then, and in the early Strauss where Brahmsian amplitude and a feast of pre-Don Juan heroics are the order of the day. As ever, Sitkovetsky tempers his virtuosic ardour with characteristic good taste, he clearly enjoys the melismatic 'vocal' quality of the writing and certainly has me believing in the slow movement as a piece of fully matured Strauss. Recording and balance are good, though I for one would have welcomed a touch less of the studio ambience (EMI Abbey Road No. 1) around the instrumental sound.'